To judge this book by its enticing cover one could reasonably expect to be in for an exotic treat: an informative ramble through the modern world's backstreets of poor artistic judgment, cheap imitation and simple bad taste.
But one would be wrong. Certainly the author knows about kitsch and its echoes, both profound and pretentious, and if there is anything more to be said on the subject I have no great interest in hearing it. But what the blurb describes as a startling analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch, is actually an American academic running riot through the English language in relentless pursuit of deep meaning and consequence.
Celeste Olalquiaga was born in Santiago de Chile and grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She holds a PhD from Columbia University, has received Rockefeller and Guggenheim awards and lives in New York City. Of all the colourful and accomplished elements of her background it is the New York connection which rings loudest as each chapter offers a new challenge in wading through academic gobbledegook. Only in that wonderfully frantic and eclectic combustion would this mixture of academic thoroughness and indulgent whimsy be treated as insight.
Ms Olalquiaga's thesis is that we badly misunderstand kitsch (the word, incidentally, derives in part from the German kitschen, to collect junk from the street). We do not give it proper respect, not so much for what it is as for what it represents to the human condition. No doubt she is right. Her introduction to the colourful history of kitsch is informative and, thankfully, relatively devoid of her more ambitious mental excursions and linguistic somersaults. She explains how the arrival of mechanised production from the middle of the last century suddenly allowed the production of exotic goods which, prior to that, were the preserve of the rich and the powerful. This democratisation of art and artefacts led to the establishment of vast shopping arcades such as the Crystal Palace in London, the Passage Jouffroy in Paris and the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples.
After this scholarly and not overly difficult outline has been drawn, Ms Olalquiaga gets down to the serious business of meaning and the various forms of kitsch which exist, such as the nostalgic kind, or the much-derided sentimental shade, and their associations with concepts such as remembrance. This is where the going gets a mite sticky. With chapters titles such as "The Debris of the Aura", "A Topography of the Unconscious" and, my favourite, "The Organ of Marvellous", she leads us into a mind-boggling maze of concepts and conjecture, invariably supported by copious footnotes, that occasionally seem to be going somewhere only to get lost in thick clumps of academic-speak. Consider this mild example, chosen at random:
"If kitsch is the residue of an aureatic dream, of which it eloquently speaks through the commodified ruin of the souvenir, then nineteenth century Atlantis, a glorious fragment of the experience of loss, commodified in a futile yet overabundant production, is intrinsically kitsch."
Set against the grind of the language is the excellent usage of many fascinating images and the wonderfully excessive design of the book. Occasionally the author joins in the fun - for instance when she introduces us to Rodney, her hermit crab in a glass globe, but even then it is evens whether she is laughing with us or laughing at us or, indeed, whether she is laughing at all.
Joe Breen is an Irish Times journalist